Cutting equipments for paper strips with sequential images found particular application for industrial printing of high productivity of photos from digital files.
The photo shooting with the current digital equipment, such as cameras, mobile phones, smartphones etc., have increased the number of photographs taken every day at enormously high values. Only a small part of the “shots” is processed for printing. Nevertheless, the number of print copies is very high and the sector of the photo printing is in constant development and is favorably influenced by reduction in costs and prompt execution of customer orders. To obtain these results, photo prints are often carried out by centralized services with orders processed via internet.
In this context, great chances of success have digital printing techniques, as the color inkjet technologies, less costly and complex and faster than traditional photographic technologies. In analogy to what occurs for the automatic processing of documents, systems for the printing of photographic images are in development, which use specialized high-speed printers and paper supports constituted by strips wrapped in big reels. On the basis of orders/customers, the images of the respective digital files are printed on the paper strips unwinding from the reels. Thereafter, the strips are rewound and transferred to cutting equipments for the cutting and the separation of the images as printed copies, with gathering by customer order and dispatch to the customers.
Traditionally, the cost of the print in industrial high production printing plants is influenced by the number and not by the length of the printed “lines”. It causes to executing prints on wide strips, which are split longitudinally in a stage subsequent to the printing stage for obtaining, at a reduced cost, more products in parallel.
The use of paper strips to be divided into image rows is also advantageous for the obtainable speeds and, from a cost and logistics point of view, for the number of strip reels to be treated, reduced with respect to the number of strip reels having a single row of images The advantages are particularly appreciable when the images have a same width (height), as is the case of “standard” prints of 100×150 mm or 100×130 mm, in which the images have the leading edges and the trailing edges in alignment, allowing a simultaneous cutting of the various rows.
By using suitable codes associated to the size of the images and machine readable is also possible to provide paper strips with images of different sizes, but the joint cutting of the row would only be possible when all the images of the rows have the same length. Otherwise, the images of dimensions different from the previous ones in the sequence should be printed in successive positions of the strip, while the not used parts of strip of the other rows would be discarded.
A problem of industrial photographic prints on continuous paper strips is the processing of image digital files in which the ratio between length and width is variable due to a user setting in a shooting phase or in a subsequent processing. Another problem concerns the processing of “panoramic” images, i.e. with a strong relationship between length and width, achieved through several shots with different angles and software merged in a single file.
The provision of identification codes machine readable for the sizes of the print copies and appropriate software enables the industrial printing on paper strips of multiple rows with images of different lengths, “panoramic” images and standard” images. However, this would lead to a completely unacceptable waste of paper for the rows sided to the images of larger length.